[FTC]: FTC Software Requirements

[Dave Scheck]

I was one of the software inspectors at the Chicago competition and have a few comments/thoughts.

This single biggest problem that we had were teams that hadn't done any programming whatsoever. These teams came to the competition with the thought that they weren't going to move in autonomous, and were going to use the default tank/arcade code to drive. This is all fine and dandy except for the fact that they didn't have the latest master code, nor did they have the latest template. Upgrading the master code wiped out the default code. As far as I could tell, there isn't "default" code available that follows the latest template. This required someone (read me) to quickly come up with simple drive code for them before they had to play in the first match.

Another problem that we faced was upgrading teams from old to new templates. The issue was that EasyC doesn't allow copy/past from one project to another (as far as I could tell). I got a tip from a team to do the following.
1. In the old templated project, create a new function (i.e. MyAutonomous, MyOperator)
2. Copy/Paste all the code needed into that function
3. Save the project as a library
4. Open the new template
5. Load the recently created library. This will add the functions in the library (MyAutonomous, MyOperator) to the User Functions section
6. Drop the user function blocks into the Autonomous and Operator blocks.
7. Save the new template as a new project.

The best advice I can pass on is to start the software inspection process early. This took way longer than expected and caused a few teams to miss a match.

If you are on an FTC team and know about software, please talk to the teams around you in the pits and make sure that they understand what needs to be done to be compliant with the rules.